There are too many names he knows here, in the long stretch of the market that has been overtaken by memorials. Maxence. Reichenbach. Isorath. Asterion. Florentine.
Asterion. Asterion. Asterion. Not dead, not for certain, but– gone, anyway. Gone without question, and that was all that mattered to those left behind. Gone and there was a fuzzy shape now always at the edge of Eik’s vision. Lodged in his chest was a stupid, brutal hope that his friend was there, always there just out of sight, but whenever he turned his head to look there was– nothing.
Of course there was nothing.
It was a nothing peopled with regret, uncertainty, wonder…. and mostly just more regret. He did not remember their last conversation as well as he remembered their first– how was that? what was wrong with him? why didn’t he say the things he should have said? were there signs he missed, red flags he should have noticed?
Eik doesn’t stand at the altar. He doesn’t care for candles and offerings, doesn’t believe anyone’s on the other side grateful for these sentimentalities. He’s walking down the lane of those who were lost, running over his thoughts like a blade the whetstone. He’s following the sound of a bell, but he doesn’t realize it yet. It makes him think of Eshek and godliness, but he doesn’t realize it yet either.
The bell draws closer, or the other way around,
The boy (everyone begins to look like a boy, when you get to Eik’s age– gods, time was wearing him down) the boy reminds him of Asterion. Something about the dusky brown of his skin and the way he looks at the stars, really looks at them even as the crowd flows past like water. “Hey,” Eik calls, voice rougher than expected. Tight with grief. He clears his throat. “You okay?”
- - - There is no better way to know us
E I K than as two wolves, come separately to a wood
Sirius doesn’t know any of the names borne on these altars.
An old woman with eyes the color of his own had told him they were names of the dead, of the missing - and the odd assortment of leaves, gourds, and candles surrounding them were meant to honor them. To keep them all from forgetting.
It had made little sense to him. How would incense and smoke help them to remember? But he walks amongst them anyway, stepping carefully around the gathered horses who bow their heads quietly and lay more keepsakes at the altars. There’s a strange hush in this corner of the markets, separated as it was from the dancing and the singing and the other festivities.
Their silence made him feel as though he did not belong here; he did not know the faces that went with the endless list of names, he had no memories of them to lay bare. He was an outsider, an intruder upon their grief.
And yet there was a tightness forming in his chest that he could not shake, reminding him all at once of a rope wound around his neck. Sirius came to a sudden stop, his eyes drifting away from the markets, away from the shrines that stood in rows like gravestones. The stars winked at him from above, bright and dancing. And he stared.
He knew it was his imagination, when he saw the pegasus with her wings like spun moonlight soaring amongst the stars. He knew it, because he had seen her fall - and he knew what happened to hawks who fell from the sky. But still he watched, as the silhouette dove in and out of sight.
”Hey.” The voice broke his concentration, and Sirius could only watch as the pegasus suddenly shattered, a thousand pieces of stardust floating gently to the ground. He flicked an ear back, flinching instinctually. ”You okay?” When he turned to the man he thought he was seeing her again, silver and wingless. Sirius blinked, and the stranger came suddenly into focus, like the world shifting back into place.
A heartbeat passed, then another, and Sirius realized he was staring and such a question needed an answer. ”Yes,” he said, shaking his head slowly from side to side. ”I am okay.” I think. He had to resist looking at the sky again then, to be sure the pegasus was gone - he swallowed past the tightness in his throat.
And then, because he felt he needed to say something else to fill the silence, and because there were lines of strain (perhaps grief?) on the other man’s face, he asked, ”You okay, also? Come you remember names?” And he gestured half-heartedly towards the altars that surrounded them.
the sun watches what i do
but the moon
knows all my secrets
@Eik !
well i wasn't expecting him to be like this
10-14-2019, 03:52 PM
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Rae [PM] Posts: 301 — Threads: 41 Signos: 15
Is it– is it magic he sees, taking shape above the stranger’s head? Or is it just a trick of the light, a shower of sparks airborne in the smoky, fragrant air?
Regardless, it’s gone as soon as the grey notices it, the illusion shattered or the sparks burned to ash, and Eik’s stranger turns with a slow look on his face like the light has traveled very very far to reach him. The man says “yes. I am okay,” and Eik wonders at the thickness of the space between words, and how it reminds him of the dark velvet between stars.
“You okay, also? Come you remember names?“
Eik tilts his head, shuffles the words around, wonders at the tongue and how far it’s traveled to end up here in the Night Markets of Denocte. (he’s full of wonder tonight, in the small spaces grief has overlooked) He thinks two heartbeats too long, just as the stranger had. “I guess so,” he says hesitantly. It isn’t clear which question he’s answering. And then, with more certainty, he says “I don’t know,” because it’s true. He doesn’t know if he’s okay. And he truly could not explain why he came here. It was not to leave trinkets, light candles, speak to the dead. It also was not chance or curiosity which brought him here– he came with intention. He wanted to be here, he just could not explain why.
(Grief loves grief, and the wallower loves the wallow. Sorrow was his lifeblood, that’s what brought him here, that’s what he doesn’t know enough to say.)
“Not sure I see the point of all this.” He shrugs– yet here I am– and his gaze returns to the altars. “Do you think they’re… still here, somehow… The dead. Watching?” It was the sort of question Eik would entrust with Asterion. But his friend was not here, would likely never be here again, and in a moment of weakness maybe Eik reaches for the starry-skinned stranger to fill his place.
“I’m Eik,” he announces, belatedly, not that it matters. He recognizes that they are not friends, not even acquaintances, and after tonight they might not ever see each other again.
The candlelight casts a thousand interlacing shadows across the grey man’s face, so that each ridge and valley is thrown into sudden and sharp contrast. And in the places where the light touches him, it turns his skin a silver so bright Sirius wants to drown in it.
”Like starlight,” he thinks to himself.
He doesn’t notice that the man is taking too long to respond. He’s too busy tracing the lines of silver light down the side of the stranger’s face, and when he looks at the darkness of his throat for at least a moment he expects to see a miniature galaxy hiding there. And when there isn’t one, he imagines it’s there instead.
“Watching us?” he echoes, and tears his gaze away from all that silver to look out over the markets. But what he’s looking for, he isn’t sure - Sirius does not known any of the dead names here, would not have recognized them if they suddenly came back. He knows only one dead girl, and he knows too that she would never be here even if she had the choice.
But death is more permanent than all that.
“No,” he says decidedly, when he tilts his head to look back at Eik. “No, stars live not with us. Sky is home of their’s.”
It does not occur to him that the mane with the silver skin and the sad eyes may have lost someone, or that he should speak with sympathy. He doesn’t recognize the look in Eik’s eyes - he has not lost anyone, has no one to lose, he wouldn’t understand that sort of longing - and he stares, perhaps for a bit too long, while trying to puzzle it out.
“I’m Sirius.” The name echoes inside of him over and over, and not for the first time it feels more like what he is rather than who he is. He doesn’t know if there’s meant to be a difference between the two, but standing in a market full of dead pictures, where the burning incense starts to taste something like sadness when he breathes it in, he thinks there should be. Maybe there was more to him than what he knew, more than what the stars had told him.
When he looks around and sees how many people visit a single shrine, he hopes that’s true.
He hopes that one day someone might make a shrine for him, and miss him when he’s gone.
“Eik,” he says, testing the name and liking the way it sounds. And then he’s walking, gesturing for him to follow and trusting that he would. “Did you know-“ The name etched into the stone of the first shrine confuses him, and he has to try far too hard to make the letters make sense. His brow creases as he frowns down at it in concentration. “Mar-e-ska? Marihscah?”
Each man’s attention takes turn resting on the other and then drifting away, so much like butterflies chasing sunlight across the forest floor. Eik is oblivious to it, of course; the way the stranger’s gaze finds out the curl of his cheek, in search of stars or other mysteries. The way he finds nothing there but flesh and scars and shadows.
(Just a man, just a man, just a man and his gloom.)
It seems funny, somehow. Eik and Sirius. Ache and Serious. What a fantastic slapstick team they would make, if they weren’t so solemn and sleepy. Two dreamers in a very solid, very real world. A very small, very private smile drifts across the grey’s expression. The humor comes and goes, too lame to share, and in its place soon follows a feeling of heavy grey.
“No,” the stranger says. “No, stars live not with us.”
In the quiet at the heels of the statement, Eik sighs heavily. A swirl of steam, tiny galaxy of heat, rises like a silent prayer and vanishes into the night. “I think so too.” He didn’t want it to be true, but wanting never moved the world. Not for men like him.
When Sirius begins to walk, Eik does not hesitate. He follows without consideration, side by side with the star-flecked stallion.
“No, I didn’t.” He did not know her, or the name carved into the driftwood next to it, or the name after that. They all haunted him anyway; lost souls will come to rest in the eaves of the broken. Their stories tangled in the vast web of his mind. “Not personally. I know she--” was it too crude, to be speaking these things here and now? He hesitates only a moment. “she drowned. In the tidal wave sent by the gods.” He had not been in Denocte for that, and so he should not feel guilty. And he did not have powers to trump the gods, and so he should not feel guilty. But he guilt ate at him anyway. His magic grabbed at all the grief and sorrow and prayers in the air and it made him walk through them, and he was not strong enough to not feel remorse for all the things out of his control.
Eik hated the weight of memories. When he was gone, he wanted to be forgotten. No grave, no memorial. No candles, flowers, prayers. He did not want to linger in the minds of others, like a ghost. That was not peace.
He turns his thoughts from death (can’t stay there or we’ll drown) to Isra, and Avesta, and Aspara, and only when his leaky heart feels somewhat full again does his attention return to Sirius. The other man had a strange out-of-place-ness, which was coupled with an intense sort of calm. Like he had simply fallen into the middle of all this strange madness and was taking it all in stride. So instead of asking where he came from or who he knew among the dead, Eik wonders out loud: “where are you going?”
